Feast and Famine: regulation of black hole growth in low-redshift galaxies

By G. Kauffmann, T. Heckman. 2008

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyse the observed distribution of Eddington ratios (L/L Edd ) as a function of supermassive black hole mass for a large sample of nearby galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We demonstrate that there are two distinct regimes of black hole growth in nearby galaxies. The first is associated with galaxies with significant star formation [M * /star formation rate (SFR) ∼ a Hubble time] in their central kiloparsec regions, and is characterized by a broad lognormal distribution of accretion rates peaked at a few per cent of the Eddington limit. In this regime, the Eddington ratio distribution is independent of the mass of the black hole and shows little dependence on the central stellar population of the galaxy. The second regime is associated with galaxies with old central stellar populations (M */ SFR » a Hubble time), and is characterized by a power-law distribution function of Eddington ratios. In this regime, the time-averaged mass accretion rate on to black holes is proportional to the mass of stars in the galaxy bulge, with a constant of proportionality that depends on the mean stellar age of the stars. This result is once again independent of black hole mass. We show that both the slope of the power law and the decrease in the accretion rate on to black holes in old galaxies are consistent with population synthesis model predictions of the decline in stellar mass loss rates as a function of mean stellar age. Our results lead to a very simple picture of black hole growth in the local Universe. If the supply of cold gas in a galaxy bulge is plentiful, the black hole regulates its own growth at a rate that does not further depend on the properties of the interstellar medium. Once the gas runs out, black hole growth is regulated by the rate at which evolved stars lose their mass.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb9bb2053dae4b882e535bf566471d2c7872adbf

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Citations in the corpus

THE NATURE OF LINER-LIKE EMISSION IN RED GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “…galaxies from SDSS as an indicator of AGN power (Kauffmann et al. 2003; Constantin & Vogeley 2006; Kewley et al. 2006; Schawinski et al. 2007; Kauffmann & Heckman 2009), while others argued they are not genuine AGNs (Stasińska et al. 2008; Sarzi et al. 2010; Cid Fernandes et al. 2011;…”
Star formation and AGN activity in SDSS cluster galaxies (2009, background): “Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) showed that for these systems, the rate of accretion onto the black hole is proportional to the bulge mass, with a constant of proportionality that depends on theage of the bulge stellar population.”
Accretion-driven evolution of black holes: Eddington ratios, duty cycles and active galaxy fractions (2011, background): “We could adopt a still stronger mass dependence in this model, which would improve agreement with the observed trends, but this would no longer be supported by empirical estimates (e.g., Hickox et al. 2009), and it would exacerbate problems in explaining the Eddington ratio distributions and local b”
A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN. (2015, methodology): “…on February 12, 2016 http://m nras.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from by Aird et al. 2013); and (3) a narrow lognormal distribution with a dispersion of ∼0.4 dex centred at an Eddington ratio of ∼0.06, as defined by Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) for nearby AGN residing in star-forming galaxies.”
The mean star formation rate of X-ray selected active galaxies and its evolution from z~2.5: results from PEP-Herschel (2012, background): “…such studies of the structure and environment of local Seyfert galaxies is that SMBH fueling in low-luminosity AGNs is driven mostly by stochastic infall of gas from the circumnuclear region of the host galaxy and bears little connection to the extended SFR in the host (Kauffmann & Heckman 2009).”
The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe (2014, methodology): “As we have summarized above, this inference is directly confirmed by measurements of the mass-dependent growth rates of supermassive black holes in the contemporary universe (Heckman et al. 2004, Kauffmann & Heckman 2009).”
Timing the starburst–AGN connection (2010, background): “Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) found that the distribution in the growth rates of black holes at low redshift swaps from a power-law distribution for black holes in old bulges (little or no star formation) to a lognormal distribution for black holes in young star-forming bulges.”
Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei (2017, background): “…anglesd@northwestern.edu Thompson 2005; Hopkins et al. 2007) or (3) the result of a common gas supply for star formation and BH growth, regulated by gravitational torques (e.g. Kauffmann & Heckman 2009; AnglésAlcázar, Özel & Davé 2013; Chen et al. 2013; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2015, 2017a).”
Accreting supermassive black holes in the COSMOS field and the connection to their host galaxies (2012, methodology): “…of black holes in SDSS galaxies using the [O III] luminosity as a tracer of AGN accretion activity and stellar masses as a tracer of the BH masses, Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) have pointed out the existence of two trends in the Eddington ratio distribution as a function of the stellar population:…”
GALAXY ZOO: THE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT CO-EVOLUTION OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AND THEIR EARLY- AND LATE-TYPE HOST GALAXIES (2010, background): “Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) normalize the Eddington parameter to argue that the Eddington limit corresponds to log(L[O iii]/MBH ) = 1.7 dex.”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – VIII. The observational properties of post-merger galaxies (2013, methodology): “Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) estimate that only 10 – 20 per cent of the [OIII] flux should be contributed from star formation in AGN classified by Kewley et al. (2001).”
The SAURON project - XVI. On the sources of ionization for the gas in elliptical and lenticular galaxies (2009, background): “…such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) can help reveal through shear numbers important connections between the nebular and stellar properties of early-type galaxies (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2003; Graves et al. 2007; Schawinski et al. 2007; Kewley et al. 2006; Kauffmann & Heckman 2009).”
FEEDBACK FROM CENTRAL BLACK HOLES IN ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES: TWO-DIMENSIONAL MODELS COMPARED TO ONE-DIMENSIONAL MODELS (2010, background): “Lowredshift observational constraints for the fraction of 3 × 108M⊙ BHs accreting at 1% and 10% of the Eddington rate are taken from Heckman et al. (2004), Greene & Ho (2007), Ho (2009), and Kauffmann & Heckman (2009).”
BLACK HOLE VARIABILITY AND THE STAR FORMATION–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS CONNECTION: DO ALL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES HOST AN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS? (2013, methodology): “Kauffmann & Heckman (2009) found that optically-selected AGNs in galaxies with young stellar populations show an approximately lognormal distribution in accretion rate (with width σ ≈ 0.4 dex) that is independent of mass.”
FEEDBACK FROM CENTRAL BLACK HOLES IN ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES. III. MODELS WITH BOTH RADIATIVE AND MECHANICAL FEEDBACK (2010, result): “We note that the possibility of QSO activity even in absence of merging, has also been recently proposed also by others (e.g., Li et al. 2008, Kauffmann & Heckman 2009, Tal et al. 2009).”